Rage of Consent

I stumbled on a strange sex-advice column at Slate the other day.  A "22-year-old autistic queer woman who has never been sexually active" reported that she's periodically told by

friends—even progressive, feminist friends—who are older than me and try to take on a bit of a “mom friend” vibe, about whether women and gay men under 25 are able to consent to sex. I am told, at least once every couple weeks, that if you’re under 25, you’re incapable of consent because your “frontal lobes are still developing.” When I point out they suspiciously only apply the argument to women and gay men, they either tell me I am too young to understand, too inexperienced to understand, or too autistic to understand. 

The columnists - a man and a woman who write the column together - came down on what I consider the right side of the question: the friends are condescending and flat wrong.  They consulted various experts who confirmed that while some parts of the brain may continue to develop until the age of 25 (though women usually mature faster than men), there's no evidence that those parts have anything to do with a capacity to give consent to sexual interaction.

It's hard to see how they could, because "consent" is such a muddy, muddled concept in the first place.  As a legal concept it's a fiction: remember that in the not very distant past, American white women of any age couldn't consent to have sex with black males; men of any age could not consent to anal sex with other males in the US; at various times, no one of any age could consent to oral sex with anyone, and so on, no matter how developed their frontal lobes were.  Contrariwise, women who had once given consent, especially in marriage, could never withdraw it afterward. "Marital rape" was a hotly contested concept for just that reason: a husband might respect his wife's reluctance to let him exercise his marital rights, but he wasn't obliged to.  A good many people confuse the legal definitions of consent with what might be called the 'common-sense' definition (and you know what I think of 'common sense'), partly out of ignorance, partly because they find it convenient to do so.

I suspect that Underage's older, progressive, feminist friends set the bar at 25 for "women and gay men" because of penetration, which Andrea Dworkin hinted was inherently violent in her 1987 book Intercourse.  When this notion was challenged, Dworkin's defenders denied that she had actually said so, because she'd cannily relied on innuendo and rhetorical questions.  Plausible deniability, in other words, which was odd because Dworkin was not renowned for indirection.  But see this essay by Nona Willis Aronowitz (Ellen Willis's daughter), which I might give more extended attention sometime.  Aronowitz is, in my opinion, wrong about numerous matters, especially when she claims that "the pro-sex side had won" the war for the soul of feminism.  That's an oversimplification at best, as Underage's complaint shows.  But then, unlike Aronowitz, I actually read Dworkin's work from Woman Hating through Intercourse, and to a lesser extent beyond.

I also suspect that if Underage's friends got their way -- suppose that the legal age of consent for women was raised to 25 -- they'd soon find reasons why it should be even higher.  And then they'd argue that because the brain, having finished developing, promptly begins to deteriorate, no one over 25, or 30, is competent to give consent either.  Since their strictures aren't based on any actual evidence, but just their personal (and yet shared, which is the disturbing part) hangups, it's fair to suppose that they don't want anyone to seek erotic pleasure: so much can go wrong.  Except themselves, I presume.

It would be interesting to ask them at what age straight men and lesbians become capable of consent.  What are straight men under 25 supposed to do for sexual partners?  Older women?  Older gay men?  What about erotic play between children of more or less the same age?  I suppose that 'progressive, feminist' women of a certain age would simply consider that to be abuse.  My late Tabloid Friend on Facebook declared dogmatically that any child who is interested in playing with another child's body must have been abused already, and was simply continuing the cycle of abuse.

I don't think that Dworkin led feminists astray: she spoke for many women - feminist, non-feminist, anti-feminist.  From what I've seen, many women, often but not always older, white, and educated, shared her disgust for sex.  Aronowitz quotes Dworkin to the effect that men must "forgo their 'precious erections' and 'make love as women do together.'"  This is disingenuous, because Dworkin also wrote about lovemaking between women as grinding misery.  (Again, I have the advantage over Aronowitz of having read a lot more than the one-volume selection of Dworkin's work that she reviewed.)  Dworkin liked to walk both sides of the street, as it were, in a way that later came to be known as "triangulation."

I want to stress that I'm not telling women, or anyone, of any age, that they must enjoy sex, or engage in it at all if they don't want to.  Erotic/sexual freedom means the freedom to say no, to abstain, to set limits.  It's the traditionalists, actually, who reject nuance and the right to say Yes to this person or at this time, and No to another person or at another time: if you say Yes once, you can never say No again, and if you say Yes but have a bad time, you brought it on yourself and deserve no sympathy.    I don't know how far Underage's older, progressive feminist friends would go in that direction, but I bet they'd go pretty far. When ostensible progressives take traditionalist positions, they need to be challenged and shut down.  Like Dworkin, who was apt to vilify women who claimed to enjoy intercourse as (Aronowitz quoting her again) "'left-wing whores' and 'collectivized cunts'".  I'm old enough to remember the lesbian/feminist sex wars of the 1980s, where such epithets and more were hurled by older, progressive feminists at other women.

Underage's story stuck with me because it fits with other symptoms of reaction I've noticed: panic about nudity, panic about touching.  I realize that my Sixties-generational optimism about a better, freer, less screwed-up sexual world was naive, but I couldn't understand why anyone would want to police other people's sex lives.  I later realized, and learned, that sex is scary.  Especially for heterosexual women, for reasons that are well-known.  But for men too.  Dorothy Dinnerstein's The Mermaid and the Minotaur (1976) taught me so much about why people distrust, even hate the body: it can't be relied on to feel pleasure or give it; it fails us, it breaks down, it disappoints, eventually it sickens and dies.  So I don't blame religion, or feminism, for what looks to me like resurgent prudery in many corners of society; I see it as part of our human nature and heritage, which needs to be examined and criticized and resisted, especially when people mobilize bad science to try to frighten and restrict the sexual lives of other people.  If freedom means anything, it means the right to say No, but also to say Yes; and clearly many people don't think we should say Yes.

Come, Let Us Reason Together

I'm reading A Skeptic's Guide to the Mind (St. Martin's, 2013) by the neurologist Robert A. Burton, and it's really quite good.  Mostly because it agrees with me, of course, but it goes beyond that into some areas I hadn't already explored as much as I should have.

Scientists from Cardiff University found genetic differences between two groups of children -- a normal control group and a group diagnosed with ADHD [attention deficit hyperactivity disorder].  According to the lead author, a professor of child and adolescent psychiatry, "Too often people dismiss ADHD as being down to bad parenting or poor diet.  As a clinician it was clear to me this was unlikely to be the case.  Now we can say with confidence that ADHD is a genetic disease and that the brains of children with this condition develop differently to the brains of other children."  The authors argue that the study proves that gene differences cause ADHD [49].

That bit about "As a clinician it was clear to me..." reminded me of an online exchange I had with a gay psychologist who declared that his training had taught him to look for biological causes for things like homosexuality, because they were always there.  I asked him why that should be, since science is supposed to be looking for causes without making advance assumptions about what they were?  He didn't have an answer, as I remember.  Burton continues:

The actual data: fewer than one-fifth of 360 children with ADHD had a particular genetic variant, while more than four-fifths didn't.  After reviewing the same data, others with equal background and expertise have come to an opposite conclusion: most ADHD must be caused by nongenetic factors [50].

I have no formal background or expertise, but I know that some others with such expertise would not have come to the "opposite conclusion."  (Burton's endnote points to a story that doesn't really back up that claim, while muddying the waters even further.)  They hold that the respective roles of the genes and the environment can't be separated, neatly or perhaps at all.  (I'd point to Richard C. Lewontin and Evelyn Fox Keller, especially the latter's The Mirage of a Space Between Nature and Nurture [Duke, 2010].)

But Burton redeems himself.  Well, partly.

What fascinates me is that the study authors would feel so strongly about the causal relationship between genes and a complex, controversial, and ill-defined condition.  Surely the authors must intellectually understand that behavior is a murky mixture of nature and nurture and rarely attributable to a single cause.  It is easy to dismiss their interpretation as mistaking correlation with causation, but let me cautiously suggest an additional possibility.  If each of us has his/her own innate ease or difficulty with which a sense of causation is triggered, the same data may generate different degrees of a sense of underlying causation in its readers.  Though purely speculative, I have a strong suspicion that those with the most easily triggered innate sense of causation are more likely to reduce complex behavior to specific cause-and-effect relationships, while those with lesser degrees of an inherent sense of causation are more comfortable with ambiguous and paradoxical views of human nature.  (Of course, for me to make any firm argument as to the cause of the authors' behavior would be to fall into the same trap).

Unfortunately for science, there is no standard methodology for objectively studying subjective phenomena such as the mind.  One investigator's possible correlation is another's absolute causation.  The interpretation of the cause of subjective experience is the philosophical equivalent of asking every researcher if he/she sees the same red that you do [50].

I think this is very good, though I think Burton could have left out words like "innate" and "inherent" without doing any harm to his speculation.  I've noticed before, and pointed out often, that people (including scientists) have a tendency to turn relative differences into absolute differences.  Whether this is "innate" or not seems to me not important, except for pricking the pride of some scientists.  "You just think that, but it's your genes talking."  That's what they are supposed to say to us!   They're above mere emotion, existing on a plane of pure reason and intellect!

I don't reject out of hand the idea that some people have more of this tendency than others, or that such temperamental differences might be partly "innate," whatever that means.  I do believe that the tendency is amenable to training: scientific training is supposed to correct our commonsense misperceptions, and I learned just from reading scientists to watch for this tendency in myself.  So even if it is innate, it's not immutable.  And even if it's a temperamental temptation in some individuals, the social environment of other scientists and peer reviewers in professional journals is supposed to correct for individual weaknesses by giving them input from their colleagues.  Even in the absence of a standard methodology for settling such questions, it's hard for me to see how a trait detected in fewer than 20 percent of an experimental group becomes "confidence that ADHD is a genetic disease".

But I liked Burton's admission that any argument he makes about others would apply to him too, and I recognize the same for myself.  And he concludes:

There is a great irony that underlies modern neuroscience and philosophy: the stronger an individual's involuntary mental sense of self, agency, causation, and certainty, the greater that individual's belief that the mind can explain itself.  Given what we understand about inherent biases and subliminal perceptual distortions, hiring the mind as a consultant for understanding the mind feels like the metaphoric equivalent of asking a known con man for his self-appraisal and letter of reference.  In the end, we should start at the beginning, with the unpleasant but inescapable understanding that the less than perfectly reliable mind will always be both the mind's principal investigator and tool for investigation [51].

And, I'd add, the mind as a tool will also often be the monkey wrench in the investigation.   This doesn't mean that we should simply give up the investigation, except for those whose temperament demands belief that the mind is a transparent window on the world; it just makes the investigation that much more difficult.  But simply pretending that the obstacles don't exist won't produce better results.  Come to think of it, one reason I seem to be more comfortable than many people with this paradox is that I encountered it many years ago in the writings of Alan Watts, starting with his book The Wisdom of Insecurity.

This indicates that I should pursue a question that occurred to me several years ago: What are the evolutionary roots of science?  It's a common assumption that a human phenomenon -- religion, say -- can be understood and discredited if scientists can construct a Darwinian origin-story for it.  We believe these foolish things because they're in our genes, because they might have served us well a million years ago, but not in modern times we must go along with Progress!  But everything we are was produced by evolution, on this assumption, so where did science come from?  How did Evolution select for test tubes and cyclotrons on the African savannah hundreds of thousands of years ago?  When I raised this question online a few years back, I got blank incomprehension.  Part of the origin myth of modern science is that Science humbles Proud Man by showing that he is part of  nature, not its head: that we are not at the center of the universe as our superstitious forebears believed, but live on a smallish planet orbiting a smallish star near but not at the rim of the vast galaxy; nor are we a special creation by the hand of the Lord but one more product of natural biological processes, like every other organism; and so on.   But many people apparently still want to believe that Science transcends biology, that it allows us to be not slaves of Nature but her Master.  This is doubtful just a priori, but the very evidence of science also undermines the fantasy.

Which reminds me of the science blogger who believed "social constructionists" should feel "uncomfortable" because "the best evidence" for their critiques of certain scientific claims comes from science.  As I wrote, I don't see any conflict here at all.  But maybe scientists should feel uncomfortable when evidence from "science" undermines their particular construction (essentialist, determinist, mechanistic) of "science."  The biggest mistake for those scientists' critics would be to cede that construction to them as What Science Is.

The Social Construction of Social Construction

Alexis Madrigal has posted at the Atlantic about his project to "reassemble an RSS feed filled with a very specific kind of blog.  I'm looking for researchers, scholars, and academics who don't post more than once per day."  Sounds like a good idea to me, and I'll watch to see where it goes.

I decided to click through to Mind Hacks, a blog Madrigal considers "exemplary."  It looks good, all right, and something in the most recent post caught my eye.  The blogger (actually one of the co-bloggers, I guess), Vaughan Bell, links to his own article at the Observer on developments in the diagnosis of mental illness: "some of the best evidence against the idea that psychiatric diagnoses like ‘schizophrenia’ describe discrete ‘diseases’ comes not from the critics of psychiatry, but from medical genetics.  I found this a fascinating outcome because it puts both sides of the polarised 'psychiatry divide' in quite an uncomfortable position."

The “mental illness is a genetic brain disease” folks find that their evidence of choice – molecular genetics – has undermined the validity of individual diagnoses, while the “mental illness is socially constructed” folks find that the best evidence for their claims comes from neurobiology studies.

I wonder about this, because I've learned to be suspicious when people from within the sciences start throwing around the term "social construction."  Generally they have no idea what social construction means (though in fairness nobody really does), and I'm afraid Bell seems to fit the generalization.  In the first place, I think he's confusing social constructionists with the anti-psychiatry movement of the 1950s and 1960s.  No doubt there's some overlap there, and it may be that some social constructionists are indeed "uncomfortable" when they "find that the best evidence for their claims come from neurobiology studies."  But while I've found plenty to criticize in much social-constructionist work, it is generally misread and/or misrepresented by outsiders.

I'll own to being a social constructionist, though I'm not terribly invested in the label.  I'm not an academic, though, and I'm not representative of anybody.  But I'm not at all uncomfortable about citing evidence from the sciences against scientists who take positions I dislike.  It's not the only way to debate them, but I don't see how being a social constructionist excludes the use of science, as Bell seems to believe.  (There's also a popular tendency to assume that any scientist who criticizes biological-determinist dogma -- Stephen Jay Gould, Anne Fausto-Sterling, Richard Lewontin, et al. -- must necessarily be a social constructionist.)

In the case of race, for example, there's no significant doubt that skin color and certain other traits associated with people of sub-Saharan African descent are determined by the genes.  (Which genes, we don't know.)  But those are the traits out of which race is socially constructed.  The constructions can be very different, so that a person who is classified as "black" in the United States would be classified as "white" in Haiti or other countries.  In the US, racial classifications have polarized in the past century: we used to have "white," "black," and "colored," with a number of discrete gradations in between.  "Mulatto" used to be a category in the US census, but it's gone now: you're either black or you're white, and though mixed-race people challenge this, the US officially operates on an uncomfortable racial binary.  Other races fit into the picture rather uneasily, because "race" (like "civil rights') has come to mean black/white first of all.  At the same time, while many people insist with liberal goodwill that skin color is just skin-deep, most people seem to think that language, customs, styles of dress, art forms, and other cultural traits are in some way tied to race, or at least ethnicity -- whatever, they're innate, tied obscurely to skin color and hair texture.

As I've argued before, the current (though older than most people realize) scientific construction of homosexuality is of the invert, the soul of a woman trapped in the body of a man and vice versa.  The science is confused, to put it gently.  This leads to confusion as to whether a man who puts his penis into another man's body is a homosexual, because the theory would dictate otherwise: only the partner who plays the "woman's role" is the real homosexual.  Yet scientists are unclear about this problem, partly because most of them seem not to have thought about it.  As with race, it comes down to a matter of definition, not science.

So as far as I can tell, science is perfectly compatible with social constructionism where mental illness is concerned.  This also ties to homosexuality, since science used to tell us authoritatively that homosexuality was a mental illness -- until suddenly it wasn't anymore.  That the categories and diagnoses of mental illness keep changing needn't be an embarrassment to science.  It only means that scientists and clinicians need to adopt a becoming modesty about their categories: they aren't final, they aren't set in stone, and they may change -- they almost certainly will, in fact.  But in order to maintain their authority, scientists are "attracted by the durability of stone", as Sartre put it.

Oddly (or maybe not), I've had the same trouble getting scientists to grasp this as I've had getting religionists to grasp it about their own magisterium: it makes them very uncomfortable to recognize or admit just how much doctrine has changed over the centuries, and that their own firmly-held beliefs are historically situated and shaped.  That's one of the paradoxes of being a thinking human being.  As the psychologist Sheldon Kopp wrote in his "Eschatological Laundry List":

We must live within the ambiguity of partial freedom, partial power, and partial knowledge.
All important decisions must be made on the basis of insufficient data.
Yet we are responsible for everything we do. 

Some people find it very hard to live with this, not because they don't act or decide, but because they hate to acknowledge that their acts and decisions are constrained by incomplete information.  One way to evade acknowledging it is to deploy false binaries and straw men, as Bell did in his post and his article: the only alternative to Science is blank-slate "social constructionism," a total rejection of science and rationality.  Which means ignoring the fact that their critics often are scientists.  When this becomes impossible to ignore, you just affect bemusement that your science-hating critics are using science to argue against you: how embarrassing for them!  But it's not embarrassing for them, not at all.